


Growth

by ravenbringslight



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Birth, M/M, Mpreg, Pregnancy, difficult pregnancy feelings, nebulous post-canon timeline where thor and loki are both alive and married, the only pregnant loki fic I have ever or will ever write, this isn't very fun but it's not dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:27:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22576315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenbringslight/pseuds/ravenbringslight
Summary: Loki finds out he's pregnant and has to deal with his complicated feelings.
Relationships: Loki/Thor, Loki/Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 44
Kudos: 734





	Growth

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 日本語 available: [Growth (Japanese translation)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23457796) by [Asagi_translator](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asagi_translator/pseuds/Asagi_translator)



> this is what pregnancy and birth is to me and this is why I never read it as a kink or as a fluffy thing. if you're looking for those here, you won't find them, and this is probably not the fic for you. I just needed to write this for myself. I debated posting this anonymously but ultimately decided not to. idek. gonna go hide under a rock now.

The moment that Loki found out he had another life growing inside him, he sat down on the edge of the bed, hard. His own body felt foreign to him suddenly. Like he was a golem that had only just realized that it had gears and springs inside of it that had been set there by someone else, their purposes unknown: like he’d been sold into slavery to a person who didn’t even yet exist, not properly, and now he was just marking time until the manacles clicked around his wrists: like every scrap of control he’d ever managed to eke out for himself was proved a lie all at once.

 _I’m going to die_ , he thought. _This will kill everything that I have ever been._

Thor, of course, was overjoyed. When Loki told him the news his face lit up like the sun after a storm, and he spun Loki around in a circle, laughing. Thor was many things—everything—king and brother and lover and husband and now _father_ , and it all felt so heavy, suddenly. Loki forced a smile onto his own face, and let Thor shower him in kisses, and tumble him into bed. He didn’t even need to fake the breathless moans that followed. Thor was always so good to him.

Sometimes in the months that followed, when Loki was retching into the privy for the third time before dinner, or when headaches nearly blinded him, he thought about freeing himself. There was a tea that the Valkyrior used. But then his hands would steal to his stomach, mostly flat still, the growth within it hidden, and think of the tiny little thing only yet the size of an almond and existing entirely at his mercy, and he’d feel a pang of sorrow so sharp that it stole his breath away. And so he didn’t seek out the Valkyrior and their tea, and the nausea eventually passed.

His stomach began to round. Thor couldn’t keep his hands off of it. He’d rub Loki’s belly, kiss it. Put his ear to it and claim he could hear the thunder of their baby already, how she would be fierce like Loki and brave like Thor, and wasn’t she a lucky little thing to come into a family where she would be so loved?

Yes, she’s lucky, Loki agreed.

The first time he felt the babe move inside of him, Loki had a panic attack.

Despite the nausea, despite the rounding of his belly and thighs and chest, it had all been hypothetical. It could have been anything. A passing illness. Too much food. But the little flutter within him was a thing entirely unprecedented in all his long years of life, and unable to be called anything but what it was: a child. Another life, entirely new, created within him, using him as its conduit, its host.

His vision narrowed and his breathing sped up, and he tore at his hair, his heart pounding.

“Get Thor,” he pleaded.

Thor came and held Loki in his arms. He stroked Loki’s back, his hair, cradled his neck, touched their foreheads together and shared the rhythm of his heart and his breath until Loki could finally match them and come down from the panicked high he’d been spiraling in.

“Thor, it’s really there. It’s really inside me. _Thor_. How will it get out?”

Knowing the mechanics of birth was one thing, and being faced with the reality of something that was _in_ and needed to get _out_ , no matter what, was completely different. Birth or surgery or magic, it would happen whether Loki wanted it to or not, and the lack of choice paralyzed him with its inescapability.

Thor could say nothing that Loki didn’t already know, and, bless him, he didn’t try; he knew that Loki hated empty words more than he hated anything else. He only murmured _I’m here for you, whatever you need me for I’ll do_ and cupped Loki’s neck and jaw and kissed him sweetly, and Loki loved him helplessly even though it was Thor who had done all of this to him in the first place.

Loki’s belly grew bigger and his hips grew wider. They ached, and sometimes wouldn't hold him up properly, but he pushed through it, refusing to become bedridden. He felt ridiculous waddling around. His chest had been softly tender from the beginning, but now it began to grow as well, blue veins visible under the thin skin. A drop of yellow colostrum welled up from his nipple one morning while Loki was bathing, and he caught it on his finger. Sniffed it. Thought about touching his tongue to it and then shuddered and wiped it into his washrag instead. The babe kicked him hard enough that he saw his belly ripple, as if it was chastising him for his lack of bravery.

As the end grew nearer, Loki found himself possessed by a sort of hungry madness. Thor wouldn’t belong to him anymore, not ever again—after this it would always be Loki and the child, whoever it was. Loki _and_. Not just _Loki_. And so Loki took all that he could take. His hands were always on Thor somewhere. His arms, around his waist, his neck—threading into his hair—tracing the scar where his eye had been. Loki’s mouth inevitably followed. He mapped out every hill and valley of his brother’s body, tasting his sweat, his tears. They barely surfaced for air for a month. Loki would wake to Thor moving inside of him, and fall asleep the same way, and it was the closest to happiness that he’d ever been.

When the birth pains started, Loki had just stepped out of the privy, and he fell right back onto it, clutching his belly. Loki’s mind had no template to apply for what would occur after this, and so it chose to apply nothing. _This is the end_ , it said. _There is no more after this._

His mind was a liar.

It took hours. He managed to call for Thor, and the midwives, and he wept a little, for the person he wanted to see the most was Frigga, and he’d never see her again. She’d never know. Never know her sons had done this with each other, to each other, never know that she had a grandchild.

 _She would have loved you as I don’t know if I can_ , Loki thought, and cried out through another contraction.

He managed, for a time. The contractions were like waves, visible as they approached, and if he centered himself he could let himself be carried up on top of the wave and ride it safely down to the other side. Thor held his hand, sometimes, which Loki was grateful for except for when he wasn’t, when he threw off anyone trying to touch him, and growled low in his chest, and moaned like he was dying, or maybe like it was him who was being born.

The waves were bigger now. They were unceasing, one after another after another, and Loki lost his bearings. They were crashing down on him, tossing him around like a cork, never giving him a chance to breathe, to center himself.

“Don’t push yet,” the midwife said. Loki laughed, high and hysterical, and pushed. He couldn’t not. His body was completely beyond his control. He bore down with every fiber of his being, _out, out, out, get out_.

Something shifted inside of him and he screamed. It was _there_ , coming out of him, an unbearable fiery pain, a choking fullness that left no room for anything other than the animal instinct to _push_ , to wail, to arch up off the bed with his legs spread wide while his body split in half and birthed two people, the babe and himself, a new Loki, a red-edged raw thing with bloody jaws that snapped his old self up whole.

A baby cried.

“We have a daughter,” Thor said, and fell upon Loki’s neck, weeping.

Loki clutched Thor’s neck, his mouth trembling, his body deflated and utterly spent. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the midwives in constant motion.

Thor kissed his mouth and stroked his hair, smiling through his tears. “You’re a hero,” Thor said shakily. “My hero.”

Loki’s face twisted. “ _Thor_.”

And then someone was handing him a small blanket-wrapped bundle, and Loki looked down into his daughter’s face, and sobbed.

 _I’m so sorry_ , he thought. He looked at her little pink face, with its tiny nose and tiny lips and tiny scrunched up eyes, and felt something in him break. He’d created a life. He’d created a death. How monstrously unfair of him, to sentence someone to that.

He loved her.

Thor held both of them, and all three of them cried. Loki’s heart had always felt like it was too big for him to contain properly, and the paths that it carved to make room for itself were jagged and sharp and hurt others as much as they hurt him—but right now, right here, it felt like there was finally enough room for it. Like he could siphon some of it into Thor, into _her_ , into the bond that now the three of them would always have, and he wouldn’t have to try to hold the whole tender, quivering thing himself.

“Hello, little one,” Loki finally managed. “I’m your mama.”


End file.
